So you look away for a few hours, and suddenly, an epic and passionate war of words erupts on Twitter. At this point, it's one-sided, however.

We're talking about Alec Baldwin versus the Daily Mail, which ran a story alleging that Baldwin's pregnant wife, Hilaria, was Tweeting during James Gandolfini's funeral Thursday.

The reporter posted the time stamps on her Tweets, which were promotional, and not exactly appropriate when Gandolfini's nearest and dearest were paying their respects to him.

Baldwin, not known for his calm and cool demeanor, or his restraint, unleashed a torrent of verbal abuse against the reporter of the story, whose byline was no longer on the online piece.

The least nasty one: "My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this (expletive) trash."

And then he Tweeted: "My wife DID NOT use her phone, in any capacity, at our friends funeral."

He added: "Good luck to all of you who know the truth."

His pregnant wife posted the following: "I don't know what hurts more: people randomly and maliciously writing lies about you, or the people who actually believe them."

Of course, as we all know, you can pre-schedule Tweets to post automatically. So there's absolutely no proof that Mrs. Baldwin was doing anything untoward at the funeral. But hey, that didn't stop a salacious story.

It was all clearly upsetting for Baldwin, who also posted the following: "How much of this (expletive) are people supposed to take? With these (expletive) blatant lies EVERY DAY."

George Stark, the reporter whose byline was removed from the story, hadn't replied via Twitter as of Thursday night.

And it now appears that Baldwin shut down his own Twitter account, @ABFalecbaldwin, after announcing that he'd fired his publicist.